Potato Expo Underway

Potato Expo Underway. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The 2013 Potato Expo is underway at Caesar Palace in Las Vegas with the largest attendance in the 5 year history. Potato industry member from all sectors are attending various breakout sessions and a large trade show. John Keeling, the executive vice president and CEO of the National Potato Council discusses what producers are discussing at the Expo.

KEELING: Well there’s going to be a lot of discussion of the state of the industry. It has not been a good year certainly for the fresh market in terms of price. I think there’s that. But again I think it’s...this is all about looking forward. This is all about new ideas. The focus on varieties is going to be very. very interesting. So we have a lot of great speakers to talk about the research needs the industry needs to address over time to sort of reverse some of the consumer attitudes.

There are a number of panels discussions planned at the Expo.

KEELING: So we can hear directly from consumers exactly what they’re feeling about potatoes. We’ve got a consumer panel - we’re going to have high potato consumers and low potato consumers. People that are frequent and people that are infrequent. Why do they take those different attitudes and how do we respond to those.

And he talks about the attendance at this year’s event.

KEELING: The energy level is high already with the highest attendance level ever. We’re already over 1800 attendees which is about 20% over last year. Double what it was when we started out so we’re very excited and got a great list of speakers.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.